Why The Wire has Earned Best TV Show Ever Tag
HBO's Gritty Hard-hitting Show About West Baltimore's Finest
Jan 22, 2009
“I'll be spending another evening in the company of Baltimore's finest”, uttered 6 Music DJ Steve Lamacq on air yesterday. Anyone familiar with The Wire knew immediately of what he spoke. Over the course of 5 seasons, HBO's The Wire has built up a reputation as one of the best TV shows ever made. The tenacious drama, set on the streets of West Baltimore, looks at the sometimes violent, sometimes mundane lives of cops, criminals, politicians, drug dealers, lawyers, dockers, snitches....everyone. All are portrayed with the same unflinching attention to detail and complete lack of artifice. The Wire is unafraid to show that good, bad and mediocre people exist in all walks of life.
High Profile Endorsement – The Wire is President Barack Obama's Fave TV Show
In Britain, The Wire series aired on the relatively inconspicuous digital channel FX, but it still found an audience of devoted fans, happy to loudly sing its praises. In America the ratings were poor, but critically The Wire was also widely acclaimed. Endorsement and eulogizing from high profile fans such as President Barack Obama (his revelation to the Las Vegas Sun that his fave character was gun-toting gay Omar Little, understandably quickly followed by the disclaimer “That’s not an endorsement. He’s not my favorite person, but he’s a fascinating character.”) raised awareness of The Wire on both sides of the pond. But the real success, and undoubtedly the best way to watch the show, came from releasing series 1-5 DVD box sets of The Wire.
The Wire on DVD
Watching The Wire on DVD is the ideal way to get to grips with a series that has no episode re-caps, takes a couple of shows to properly get into, and is virtually impossible to pick up halfway through. It's only after watching 4 or 5 episodes that the realisation dawns...the slow build, drip feed effect of The Wire has provided an inside out knowledge of every character. Now The Wire has got you. Unlike other episodic TV shows, The Wire doesn't tell a different story in an hour each week. There's no simple set-up and resolution. It builds slowly and meticulously. The Wire reveals the truth in weekly doses. Nightly if you're watching it on DVD.
Dominic West as McNulty and Other Notable Characters
The characters feel like people you already know. Annoying, unreliable, and instantly recognisable from real life. Jimmy McNulty, played by Dominic West, is an enigmatic rebel with a natural instinct for police work, but he's also an arrogant, cheating, drunkard. He's great! West is a British actor, but his American twang is impeccable. In The Wire season 2 he actually has to put on an English accent to facilitate a bust on a brothel. The Dick Van Dyke cockney drivel he comes out with is the funniest thing ever. West can even do an American doing a really bad British accent. He is that cool. Alongside McNulty are fellow cops Bunk (Wendell Pierce), Kima (Sonja Sohn), Lester (Clarke Peters), Daniels (Lance Reddick) and.....well, the list goes on and on. As long as they haven't got killed, characters remain in the show, alongside any new faces. Relationships continue, as they do in real life, even if jobs change. (McNulty spent practically all of season 2 stuck on a police boat due to being kicked out of the homicide division).
On the flip side, the criminals in The Wire don't disappear either. The show continues to follow characters from season 1, like Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), even when the cops have moved on to new cases.
The Wire – The Reason TV Series Were Invented
The Wire is an absolute television triumph. There's no way a drama of such intrinsic complexity would work in any other medium. It's the reason TV series were invented. What's interesting about The Wire is that it emerged from the minds of journalists and authors, not television scriptwriters. Series creator David Simon spent a year shadowing the Baltimore police in his capacity as reporter with the Baltimore Sun. This resulted in Simon's book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and laid much of the ground work for The Wire. Former Baltimore detective, ex-teacher and fellow author Ed Burns also collaborated with Simon on The Wire, drawing on his knowledge of police bureaucracy and urban decay in the district. Many other writers have also contributed to The Wire, including most notably George Pelecanos, author of several detective novels, and Richard Price, novelist and screenwriter, who wrote extensively for season 5.
This literary background promotes writing unafraid to develop stories and characters slowly, and to focus on the minutiae of life. It's what sets The Wire apart, and gives it more in common with the British social realist film-making tradition than the majority of American output. Perhaps that's why it's been so well received in Britain. The Wire – it's like a Ken Loach film with guns.
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